When Nanowires Meet Ultrahigh Ferroelectric Field–High-Performance Full-Depleted Nanowire Photodetectors

One-dimensional semiconductor nanowires (NWs) have been widely applied in photodetector due to their excellent optoelectronic characteristics. However, intrinsic carrier concentration at certain level results in appreciable dark current, which limits the detectivity of the devices. Here, we fabricated a novel type of ferroelectric-enhanced side-gated NW photodetectors. The intrinsic carriers in the NW channel can be fully depleted by the ultrahigh electrostatic field from polarization of P(VDF-TrFE) ferroelectric polymer. In this scenario, the dark current is significantly reduced and thus the sensitivity of the photodetector is increased even when the gate voltage is removed. Particularly, a single InP NW photodetector exhibits high-photoconductive gain of 4.2 × 105, responsivity of 2.8 × 105 A W–1, and specific detectivity (D*) of 9.1 × 1015 Jones at λ = 830 nm. To further demonstrate the universality of the configuration we also demonstrate ferroelectric polymer side-gated single CdS NW photodetectors with ultrahigh photoconductive gain of 1.2 × 107, responsivity of 5.2 × 106 A W–1 and D* up to 1.7 × 1018 Jones at λ = 520 nm. Overall, our work demonstrates a new approach to fabricate a controllable, full-depleted, and high-performance NW photodetector. This can inspire novel device structure design of high-performance optoelectronic devices based on semiconductor NWs.